Ordinary Grace (27 page)

he drive to the home of Emil Brandt was no more than five minutes but it felt like forever getting there. Because of my father’s doubts, seeds of doubt had been planted in my own

thinking and I thought maybe Jake was right. Maybe I should have said nothing and left the resolution of the whole mess in God’s hands. But what was done was done and when we parked in front of the old farmhouse I got out and steeled myself for the ordeal ahead.

As we approached the porch I could hear Emil Brandt playing his grand piano inside. I knew the piece. It was something Ariel had composed and in the wash of its beauty I swore I could feel Ariel’s presence. We stood on the porch until the piece was finished then my father—reluctantly, I could tell—raised his hand and knocked on the screen door.

He called, Emil?
Nathan?
Through the screen I saw Brandt rise from the great piano and

come to greet us. He pushed open the door and said, Who’s with you? Frank, my father said.
He smiled with pleasant surprise. What brings you both back so

We need to talk.
The smile fell away and Brandt looked troubled.This sounds serious. It is, Emil.
Brandt stepped outside and we took the wicker chairs where not

long before he’d sat in good friendship with my parents. With the sun down, we sat in the moody blue of dusk.
Well? he said.
Did you father my daughter’s child, Emil?
My father asked it so directly that it startled even me and I could see that Brandt was clearly taken aback.
What kind of question is that, Nathan?
An honest one. And I would appreciate an honest answer.
Brandt turned his face away and held himself motionless for a long time. She was in love with me, Nathan. Blind and battered as I am, she loved me.
Did you love her, Emil?
Not in that way, not really. I’d come to rely on her greatly, and I loved her presence in this house, and she reminded me so much of . . .
So much of whom?
Of her mother, Nathan.
And that’s why you made love to an eighteen-year-old girl? She reminded you of her mother?
Was it anger I heard in my father’s voice? Profound indignation? Betrayal?
I know how terrible it sounds, but it wasn’t like that, Nathan. It happened once. Just once, I swear, and I was so ashamed. But Ariel, for her it was so much more. Of course. Something like that to one so young, it means everything, I know. She talked marriage. Marriage to me, can you envision that, Nathan? A man more than twice her age, blind as a bat and with the face of a monster. What kind of marriage would that be for her once she opened her eyes and realized the poor bargain she’d struck? And what about Lise? Lise could never have accepted someone else in our retreat here, especially someone who might, in my sister’s understanding, steal all my affection. Nathan, I told Ariel no. Honest to God, I did everything in my power to dissuade her from throwing her life away on a wreck like me. But she . . . oh, the young, they’re always so certain of what they want.
Brandt stopped talking and the silence was a great, heavy stone that settled on us all. He was blind but he nonetheless looked down as if his eyes were weighted with shame.
I tried to kill myself once before, he finally said. His voice was like something that had come from a distance on the wind. Did you know that? In the hospital in London after I was wounded. I fell into such a darkness. I couldn’t imagine a life for myself this way. He put his fingertips to his monster of a face and then went on. Do you want to know why I tried to kill myself this time? A more noble reason, or at least that’s what I told myself. I wanted Ariel to be free of me, and I simply couldn’t see any other way.
Except killing her, I said.
Frank, my father cautioned.
Killing her? Brandt raised his head and a terrible understanding blossomed in his sightless eyes. That’s what you think? That I killed Ariel? That’s why you’re here?
The screen door opened and Lise Brandt stepped outside and looked at us with concern and irritation as if we were trespassing. She said, Emil? Except that because of her deafness and the resulting oddness of her speech it came out something like
Emiou
?
Brandt signed to his sister.
I wan them to go away, she said in a drone.
Brandt turned so that she could read his lips. We have business to finish, Lise. Go back inside. She didn’t immediately obey him and he said, It’s all right. Go on. I’ll be in soon.
Lise drew herself back slowly like mist being sucked into the house and I thought that if I were her I’d hide myself and listen but of course that would do her no good. I watched through the screen as she vanished into the kitchen and I heard the faint sound of cookware rattling.
It’s true then, my father said. The baby was yours.
She didn’t tell me about the baby, Nathan. She never said a word. And when I found out that she’d died pregnant, I hoped against hope that Karl might be the father.
You hoped that Ariel might be sleeping around?
That’s not what I meant. It just seemed impossible. Ariel and I had been together only once.
She came here often after dark, my father said. Frank saw her leave the house several times.
Yes, Brandt admitted. But she came late at night and all she did was stand out there in the yard and watch my window.
You’re blind, Emil. How could you know this?
Lise saw her. She wanted to chase her off, but I asked her not to interfere. I talked to Ariel and she promised to stop her nocturnal visits.
Did she?
I suppose so but I don’t really know. It was right after that that I tried to kill myself. And then so much happened.
Did she come the night she disappeared?
I’m sure she didn’t. If she had, Lise would have said something to me. Look, he pleaded, I didn’t kill Ariel. I couldn’t have killed Ariel. In my wounded way, I loved her. Not as she would have liked, but in the only way I was able. You have to believe that, Nathan.
My father closed his eyes and in the gathering dark sat in silence and I believed he was praying. I do, he finally said.
Brandt looked as if he was in physical pain. You’ll have to tell Ruth, I suppose.
No. That’s something you’ll have to do, Emil.
All right. I’ll talk with her tomorrow. Will that do, Nathan?
Yes.
Nathan?
What is it?
We’re finished as friends, aren’t we?
I’ll pray for the strength to forgive you, Emil. But I have no wish to see you again. My father rose. Frank?
I stood too.
God be with you, Emil, my father said in parting. He didn’t say it in the way he sometimes did to a congregation as a blessing at the end of a service. This sounded more like a criminal sentence. I followed him to the Packard and we got in. I looked back before we drove away and Emil Brandt and the dark of the coming night were merging and if he stayed there long I figured you wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.
At home my father parked in the garage and turned off the engine and we sat together in the stillness.
Well, Frank?
I’m glad I know the truth. But I kind of wish I didn’t. It doesn’t make anything better.
There was a playwright, Son, a Greek by the name of Aeschylus. He wrote that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Awful? I said.
I don’t think it’s meant in a bad way. I think it means beyond our understanding.
I guess there are graces I like better, I said.
My father slipped the car keys into his pocket. He put his hand on the door handle but didn’t get out. He turned back to me. There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Frank. A congregation in Saint Paul would like me to be their pastor. I’m going to accept.
We’re moving?
Yes.
When?
In a month or so. Before school begins.
I guess that would be all right, I said. Does Mom know?
Yes, but not your brother. We should go inside and tell him.
Dad?
Yes?
I don’t hate Mr. Brandt. In a way, I feel sorry for him.
That’s a good beginning. It would be nice to leave this place with a heart that’s not full of enmity.
I saw a firefly blink in the dark of the garage and I realized it was getting late but I didn’t move.
Is there something else, Frank?
There was and it was Warren Redstone. Although I knew the sheriff intended to question Morris Engdahl and Judy Kleinschmidt further about the night Ariel was killed, I didn’t believe anymore that they had something to do with her death. Redstone had murdered my sister. I accepted that now. I’d fought against believing it, a battle whose real purpose was simply to keep me from being overwhelmed by guilt because I didn’t do anything to stop Danny’s great-uncle when he made his escape across the river. I was finished with blame, finished with feeling lousy, and so I told my father everything. The whole horrible story spilled from me in a torrent I couldn’t stop, a complete unburdening. I’d been afraid that he would be angry, that he would condemn me. In my worst imaginings, he ceased to love me. Instead he held me and pressed his cheek to the top of my head and said, It’s okay, Son. It’s okay.
No, it’s not, I insisted between sobs. What if they never catch him?
Then I suppose God’ll have a lot to say to him when they meet face-to-face, don’t you think?
I drew away a little and looked into his eyes. They were brown and sad and gentle.
You’re not mad at me?
I’m ready to be done with anger, Frank. I’m ready to be done with it forever. How about you?
Yeah, I guess I am.
Then let’s go inside. I’m kind of tired.
I opened my door and walked with my father toward the house where Jake and Gus were waiting and where my mother at her piano filled the night with music.

he days came hot one after another but there was decent rain and by mid-August the farmers in my father’s congregations were commenting guardedly to one another that the crops in

the valley all looked pretty good. What they really meant but would not allow themselves to say openly was that they were anticipating the best harvest in years.

My mother began to organize for our move. The most difficult part, I suspect, was clearing Ariel’s room. She did this alone and over a long period and I often heard her crying as she boxed. Most of what had been Ariel’s we didn’t take with us to Saint Paul. My father donated her things to an agency that distributed clothing and other items of necessity to the migrant families who came in large numbers to work the harvests.

We weren’t the only ones who left New Bremen for good that summer. Danny O’Keefe’s family moved too. His mother got a job teaching in Granite Falls and they put their house up for sale and by the second week in August, Danny and his family were gone.

In those final days New Bremen for me had a different feel. Whether this was because of our move or because of all that had happened that summer I couldn’t say. It seemed as if the town and everything in it was already a part of my past. At night sometimes I tried to reach out and grab hold of what exactly I felt toward the place but everything was hopelessly tangled. I’d lived there five years, the longest I would live anywhere until I married and had my own family and settled down. I’d been a child there and had crossed the threshold, perhaps early, into young manhood. In the daylight I walked a lot, usually alone, visiting the places that would become monuments in my memory. The trestle that had been the scene of so much tragedy that summer. The quarry where I’d taken such childish pleasure in challenging and besting Morris Engdahl. Halderson’s Drugstore with its frosted mugs of root beer. I walked along the river, passed the place where Warren Redstone had built his little lean-to. The sides were already collapsed and I knew that in the flooding which came every spring all sign of the man’s presence would be washed away. I lingered at the place below the home of Emil Brandt and his sister where the trail threaded up the rise through the cottonwoods, the trail I’d been so certain was the way my sister had been carried to the river. And a little farther on I stood below Sibley Park where the cold black ash of many bonfires lay on the sand like leprous sores and where Ariel had last been seen alive on this earth. If understanding was what I sought, I was disappointed.

After Ariel’s funeral my mother took Jake to only one more session of speech therapy. He told me afterward that they questioned him mercilessly about the inexplicable disappearance of his impediment. When he insisted that it was the result of a miracle they looked at him as if he said he’d kissed a frog and been granted three wishes. Then my mother calmly told them it was the absolute truth, a miracle by the grace of God, and they had no reply.

Gus spent more and more time away and although he was reluctant to talk I knew because my father told me that he was helping Ginger French at her ranch. He’d put the brakes on his drinking and didn’t hang out anymore with Doyle.

As the day of our departure drew nearer we had a lot of visitors, folks stopping in to say their good-byes. Many were a part of my father’s congregations but others were a surprise. Edna Sweeney came with cookies. I had no idea if she and Avis were finally doing okay in the sack but she was such a good woman at heart that I hoped so. I knew I would miss the view of her underthings drying on the line, swinging a little in the summer breeze as if beckoning. The Klements dropped by one evening and while our parents talked on the porch Peter and Jake and I spent an hour sitting in the pasture behind our house kicking around the Twins and
The Twilight Zone
and speculating on what living in Saint Paul would be like. Peter was not hopeful. He thought a place like Cadbury—or even a town like New Bremen—was infinitely preferable. There were streets in Saint Paul, he warned, where people couldn’t walk safely at night. And everybody locked their doors. Before he left he repeated his invitation to come anytime for a visit and he’d teach us about motors and things. The Coles visited, too, briefly. They’d been old when they had Bobby and his death had made them even older. They were not much more than fifty then but in my memory they are always ancient. They held hands as they walked away and I thought that although they’d lost Bobby they were lucky. They still had each other.

A week before we left town Morris Engdahl was killed in an accident at the cannery where he worked. He was out on bail, awaiting his hearing on the Mann Act charges that had been filed against him. He’d gone to work drunk and the foreman had told him to go home and Engdahl had taken a couple of swings at his boss. He’d missed and, off-balance, had tumbled from the platform where the altercation took place and had broken his neck in the fall to the cannery floor below. In a kind of irony, Engdahl’s father, who was not a churchgoing man, requested that my dad preside at the burial service. I asked if I could be there and my father allowed it. It was one of the saddest funerals I’ve ever attended. Engdahl had no mourners at all, not Judy Kleinschmidt or even his father, whom we later found out was dead drunk in a town bar.

Two days out from the move to Saint Paul the house already had the feel of abandonment. Mother had directed Jake and me to pack up our things in the boxes she provided and we emptied our dresser and our closet. Jake had carefully packed his model airplanes and his comic books. I had nothing special that I cared about in the same way and threw in my own collected junk haphazardly. Walking through the house we negotiated a path between stacks of boxes: linens and towels and tablecloths; my father’s books; table lamps and vases and framed pictures; kitchen utensils and pots and pans. We still had curtains on the windows but not much else to cozy the place.

In those last days Jake had begun to divide his time between our house and the home of Lise Brandt. My parents had severed their relationship with Emil. When Brandt told her truth about his relationship with Ariel my mother had been outraged but she hadn’t held long to that useless emotion. What’s done is done, I heard her tell my father, and I believe she meant it. I don’t know that she ever forgave Emil Brandt. Maybe like Jake she was simply tired of being angry. As far as I know she never saw Brandt socially again. I suppose that in its way this, too, was a loss she suffered.

But with Jake it was different. He told me he felt sorry for Lise. As far as he could tell, the only people in the world who cared about her at all were he and Emil, and although Lise seemed fine with the company of her brother her face lit up with undeniable delight whenever she saw Jake. He visited often using the garden as an excuse to offer his companionship. He told me that he sometimes saw Emil Brandt sitting on the porch or heard the music of his playing drift from the house but he never talked to the man. It wasn’t because he felt any anger. He claimed that he sensed something coming from Brandt that was like strong waves pushing him away. I figured Jake was onto something. The Brandt family had always seemed a kind of island, separate and distant and a little forbidding, and there had never been, as far as I could see, the kind of energy, whether love or the yearning for simple human connection, that held them together or drew the larger world to them. As a family they seemed to have no center and I figured they would fall apart. Because my own family was healing and because wholeness seemed possible again, I kept the Brandts in my prayers.

On the day before we were to leave New Bremen my brother asked if I would help him and Lise with a project. She wanted to build a little wall around one of her flower beds using the rocks she’d pulled and piled when creating all her garden spots. Jake said it would be easier with three of us, especially because some of the rocks were big. I wasn’t excited about returning to the Brandt home but I agreed to give a hand.
We arrived after lunch and found Lise at work loading a wheelbarrow with the smaller stones from the huge pile beside the shed. The flower bed itself was in the middle of the yard, positioned in a sunny area between deep pools of shade that lay beneath a couple of tall hackberry trees. It was circular and at its center was a birdbath. Jake had explained that what Lise had in mind was to use the smaller stones to build the wall maybe a foot high and to put the large rocks inside, placing them carefully among the flowers so that the effect in the end would be a touch of wildness within the circular geometry of the wall.

She wore a loose short-sleeved yellow blouse and dungarees and tennis shoes and had soiled gardening gloves on her hands. It was hot and the blouse clung to her sides and back. We came from the river, through the gate in the back fence. She was intent on her work and didn’t know we were there until Jake circled so that she could see him. She clapped her hands together like a child pleased at a new toy and she signed something to Jake who signed something back and then he said, Frank came too. He pointed toward me and she turned and although she didn’t beam as brightly as she had with Jake she nonetheless looked pleased to see me. In her drone she said, Thang you, Frang.

We got to work. Mostly it was a question of transport, hauling the rocks from the pile to the garden thirty yards distant. Jake and I did this part while Lise constructed the wall. We filled the wheelbarrow half full because any more was impossible for us to handle and crossed the yard through the hackberry shade and dumped the stones in jumbles spaced along the edge of the garden. Lise carefully fitted the stones together with a bit of mortar that she’d mixed in a bucket.

We worked late into the afternoon. Toward the end I heard the swell of a piece I recognized as Rachmaninoff coming through windows of the house and saw Emil Brandt step onto the front porch and sit down in his rocker and I figured he was playing a record on his stereo or maybe a tape on his reel-to-reel. Not long afterward the wall was complete. Jake and I were sweating like a couple of pack mules. Lise put down her mortar trowel and pulled off her garden gloves and said, Wan pop?

Yes, Jake and I answered together.
She smiled and made gestures to Jake who understood clearly. When she turned to go, he said, She wants us to get the crowbar out of the shed. We’ll need it to pry the big rocks loose that she wants to put in with the flowers.

I’ll get it, I offered.
The door of the shed was open and I stepped inside. Sunlight streamed in at my back. The shed smelled of damp soil and faintly of a mechanical odor like cutting oil. Lise kept the little place neatly organized. Clay pots and potting soil stood stacked beside each other against the far side. The tools of her yard work—rake, hoe, edger, clippers, shears, shovel, spade, pick, trowels—all hung neatly from hooks or nails set into a row of two-by-fours that ran horizontally along the inside of the wall midway between floor and roof. To the right was a narrow workbench with a vise and above the bench a Peg-Board that was hung with hand tools—hammer, screwdrivers, hacksaw, wrenches, chisels—and beneath the bench was a small cabinet with half a dozen drawers. The cabinet was honey-colored and decorated with handpainted flowers. Leaning in one corner of the shed was a long pry bar and cradled across a couple of nails next to it lay the smaller crowbar. The crowbar I remembered well. That day in early summer when without thinking I’d touched her and she’d gone berserk, I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been so quick to dodge her wild swing. I reached for the crowbar and as I pulled it off the wall I cut my finger on the head of one of the nails. The cut wasn’t bad but it was bleeding and my hands were dirty. I took the crowbar out to Jake and showed him my wound.
Lise keeps a box of Band-Aids in one of the drawers in the shed, he said. I don’t know which one.
I returned to the honey-colored cabinet and began opening drawers. Mostly they held nails and screws and washers. But when I opened the middle drawer something else caught my eye. Amid a collection of bolts and nuts lay a delicate gold watch and a mother-of-pearl barrette.
Jake was stretched out on the grass. As I walked to him he glanced at my face and then he sat up. What’s wrong?
I held out my hands that were soiled with dirt and blood.
Jake looked at what I held in my palms, the little treasures that had gone missing with Ariel, and his eyes crawled up and met my gaze and I saw something in them that made me go cold.
You knew, I said.
No. Then he said, Not for sure.
He looked away toward the house where Emil Brandt rocked on the porch like a metronome keeping time with Rachmaninoff. I moved closer to him and leaned down. Tell me.
I didn’t know, he said.
You said you didn’t know for sure.
I thought . . . He stopped and I was afraid he was going to commence to stuttering but he just spent a few seconds collecting himself and then he went on. That day you told me Mr. Brandt killed Ariel I began to think about it, and I thought probably it wasn’t him.
Why not him?
Jesus, Frank, he’s blind. But Lise, she’s strong and can see, and she never liked Ariel. But I figured if she did it, it had to be an accident. Like when she almost hit you with this crowbar, he said and picked up the iron tool. You remember?
Yeah, I remember. But maybe it wasn’t an accident.
Jake looked down. I thought about that too, he said.
Why didn’t you say something?
She doesn’t have anything, Frank. Just this place and her brother. And maybe she thought Ariel was going to take that away from her. And what if people knew and she went to prison or something?
She should go to prison, I said.
See? I knew if I said anything you’d get mad.
Jake, this isn’t like she just did something a little bad. She killed Ariel.
Putting her in prison won’t bring Ariel back.
She has to pay for what she did.
Why?
What do you mean why?
Look around you. She almost never leaves this yard except to go down to the river sometimes. And she never has visitors except me. Isn’t that what a prison is?
She might hurt someone else. Did you ever think of that? Jake put the crowbar down in the grass and didn’t answer.
I stood above him pissed as hell and at the same time marveling. He’d once again seen something that the rest of us had missed, an awful truth that he’d held to alone. Even in my anger I understood what a terrible burden that must have been.
Did you say anything to Lise?
He shook his head. Then he said, Seventy times seven, Frank.
What?
He lifted his face in the sunlight. Seventy times seven. It’s how we’re supposed to forgive.
This isn’t about forgiveness, Jake.
What’s it about then?
It’s the law.
I heard the back door of the deck slide open and looked up and saw Lise come out carrying a tray that held three Coke bottles and a small plate of cookies.
Jake didn’t take his eyes off me. The law? That’s really what you’re thinking about?
Lise descended the steps and started across the yard toward us.
Frank, Jake said pleading.
I could see the smile on Lise’s face. I could see how lightly she walked.
Please, Jake said.
Warren Redstone, I replied.
Jake looked at me, confused. What?
The sheriff ’s still looking for him. What if they catch up with him and he tries to run and gets himself shot? Could you live with that?
Jake considered this and his shoulders dropped and he shook his head in defeat.
I’d lived for weeks with the belief that I’d let Ariel’s killer escape and although my father had helped me understand how to carry that burden it still weighed on me. Standing in that shaded old farmyard, I finally felt it evaporate. Warren Redstone was not a killer. He’d never done a thing to harm my family. And what I was about to do would free him too.
I put my hands out. Lise Brandt when she reached us glanced at what I held and I saw by her look that she recognized these things.
She quickly composed herself and said with a smile, Wha tha?
I said, You know what they are.
She kept smiling and shook her head.
You killed Ariel, I said.
She frowned dramatically. No, she replied and it came out like a small moan.
Jake looked up at me. What are you going to do, Frank?
I kept my eyes on Lise Brandt and my face toward her so that she could read my lips. I have to tell someone. I’m going to start with Mr. Brandt.
I left Jake sitting on the grass and walked past Lise where she stood with the tray still in her hands. I’d taken only a few steps when I heard the clatter of the tray and bottles as they hit the ground and a banshee cry at my back and Jake screaming, Lise, no!
I turned and saw her stoop and grasp the crowbar and charge at me, the whole time wailing like a wounded beast. She swung the bar at my head. I dodged and hit the ground and rolled and tried to get to my feet as she came again with the hard iron in her hand but I felt my ankle twist painfully and I crumpled to the grass. I lifted my arm in a feeble attempt to deflect the blow I knew was coming.
Then Jake was on her, grabbing her arm and holding fast. She screamed bloody murder and tried to shake him loose and slapped at him with her free hand.
From the porch, Emil Brandt yelled, What’s going on?
She turned and turned again and finally flung Jake from her and he fell to the ground. She stood over him with the crowbar raised high, breathing deeply and loud. I tried to rise but my twisted ankle prevented me from moving quickly enough. Jake just lay there looking up at her helplessly. He didn’t even lift a hand to defend himself.
And then the final miracle of that summer was delivered. Something—only God knows what—stayed the hand of Lise Brandt.
I heard breath rushing from her in and out and in. I watched paralyzed as the crowbar held still, poised high in the air. I nearly wept as she slowly lowered it and let it fall to the ground at her feet. She collapsed onto her knees facing Jake and she clasped her hands as if in prayer and droned, Sorry. I’m sorry.
Jake gathered himself and knelt beside her. He reached out but did not touch her. It’s all right, he said.
Emil Brandt hollered, Is everything okay out there?
Jake looked at me and I saw no child left in him at all. He said, I’ll stay with her, Frank.
I stood and held fast to the things that had once been Ariel’s and limping because of my injured ankle I began to make my way through the deep shadows of that August afternoon toward the porch and Emil Brandt.